The Masai Take a Chief

Herding their cattle over the grassy uplands rolling down from Kilimanjaro in what is now Kenya and Tanganyika, the Masai were fierce, sensual warriors who used dung and ochre for hair oil and drank cattle blood laced with urine. In periodic sport they swooped down on their Bantu neighbors, ramming seven-foot spears through the males and carrying off their women, who often did not seem to mind; the tall, aristocratic Masai were notable men, and Masai wives did not work.

The coming of the white man brought syphilis and smallpox to the Masai, rinderpest to plague their herds, and ultimately the division of the Masai into two tribes, one of 60,000 in Kenya, the other of 46,000 in Tanganyika. The Kenya Masai, both better protected by the colonial government and better behaved, found a chance to enjoy their former glories during the Mau Mau troubles, when the British put them to work tracking and killing Kikuyu terrorists. But in Tanganyika the Masai, disorganized and disfranchised, have been increasingly at the mercy of settlers encroaching on their grazing lands. Last week, as a long step toward doing something about it, the Masai installed Edward Boniface Mbarnoti as the first chief in history with federal powers over all tribesmen in Tanganyika.

The Choice. A more able--or less likely --spokesman for their interests the primitive, unruly Masai could hardly have found. Chosen from 200 candidates in a three-month search by the tribe's council of elders, Mbarnoti is a big (6 ft., 180 Ibs.), 28-year-old schoolteacher who speaks excellent English and whose only ambition--until the elders tapped him last September--was to go to England to study. The son of a slave freed by French Roman Catholic missionaries, Edward herded cattle until he was nine, then, as his father's "love son" (or favorite), was sent to school. Converted to Catholicism, he ignored most of the various age rituals of the Masai (e.g., Masai aged 17-27 take turns sleeping in the communal hut with the tribe's unmarried women), frankly admitted: "I didn't want this big job, but I took it because someone had to."

The Lecture. Under the cool slopes of Monduli Mountain last week Edward Mbarnoti, dressed in a ceremonial blue robe and a monkey-hair headdress, officially received the chieftainship from Tanganyika Governor Sir Richard Turnbull, and resplendent British uniforms mingled with the Dogpatch garb of spear-carrying Masai elders and tribesmen. Edward's coronation speech was a simple statement of Masai needs: legal recourse against farmers squatting on Masai lands, improved water facilities, a share in the profits of the tourist-frequented game reserves given up by the Masai.

In a remarkably ill-tempered reply Sir Richard in effect told the Masai to be satisfied with the white man's edicts, and to accept -L-40 ($112) as their cut of the tourist trade. Shocked, most of the assembled Masai withdrew out of hearing until he had finished his harangue, while an amazed British reporter said under his breath: "I thought this sort of thing was finished 25 years ago."

The new chief took the Governor's lecture in stride. After all, he said, "this is only the beginning."

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